* Moon-Mars is basically unfunded. NASA has to steal from other missions just to study Moon-Mars
* The moon is a lousy steppingstone to Mars. Think about it: to land on a planet with an atmosphere, you can slow down with a parachute. To overcome your delta-V for a moon landing, you need to carry enough fuel to decelerate and to re-launch! If you just skip the moon entirely, you don't have that horribly expensive deceleration phase followed by that expensive acceleration phase.
Face it, most of the actual science done in space has been done by robots and will continue to be for the forseeable future. Humans in space is not a bad idea, but Bush didn't fund Moon-Mars and it's unlikely to get funded any time in the forseeable future. Personally, I've always thought Moon-Mars was a cynical political ploy to win a slice of the nerd vote. But that's just me.
This somewhat strained joke is based on a much better piece by Umberto Eco. Years ago (1994) Eco wrote a piece comparing the MS world and the Mac world to major religions. His comparison fits much better. Read it all here.
. . . I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
. . . You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.
I learned threads from this book by W. Richard Stevens.
I have to warn you that Stevens' books are specific to C, but he has a clear and concise style, and his treatment of the basic issues such as synchronization, locking, shared memory, and semaphores is excellent. If you're coding in C, buy the book; if you're not coding in C you may not need to own it, but you ought to spend a couple hours reading Stevens' discussion of key issues.
And there's a cool thing you can do with that 12-volt battery in the trunk that makes your prius into an emergency generator. Alternate instructions here. Warning, it might void your warranty. My Prius is 4 years old, so my warranty isn't terribly valuable anymore...
according to the Whitehouse in January 2004, Bush ordered NASA to go to Mars, revisiting the Moon on the way. However, what Bush failed to do was to provide any significant funding for a Mars Mission. That means that NASA must cut spending from all other programs to fund Mars studies. According to this site "Bush instructed NASA to pull $11 billion from their budget over five years to pay for his Mars brainstorm â" almost 13% of their funding. The only additional money he promised was $1 billion over five years... Bear in mind that this radical surgery on NASAâ(TM)s direction was apparently completed without any scientific peer review whatsoever."
So that's what is happening to space science in the USA as the Bush term runs out. We are cannibalizing existing programs to study a mission that is unlikely to be funded. Yet another thing Bush has managed to screw up!
And I have not problem with creationism being taught as long as it is taught as science. So every bad fact they have can be pointed out.
I do. Creationism belongs in philosophy class, not science, because creationism makes no testable claims. Creationism says that the world we see is the world science describes, only god not natural processes made it that way. Dinosaur bones in the rock? God hid them there. Structural and genetic similarities in the tree of life? God did it. Why? God works in mysterious ways. No testable claims. Or, more accurately, any testable claims are then altered to match the outcome of the test.
Science class is where we learn how claims are tested. Philosophy class is where we learn to compare systems of thought and see how they differ. The Flying Spaghetti Monster was invented to show now easy it is to make up systems of thought that "explain" the world we see without making testable claims.
What you need is to burn serious calories. You need aerobic exercise. The whole "aerobic" thing came out of the research of a U.S. Air Force doc named Cooper. He defined fitness as the ratio of your body's maximum oxygen uptake to its resting oxygen uptake.
Turns out to increase that ratio, you have to get yourself (at least slightly) out of breath, and stay there 20 or more minutes, 4 times / week. To get out of breath, you've got to get your legs involved in a big way. Jogging, biking, and swimming are the most common ways.
If you have a staircase, run up and down for 20 minutes (booring). Or get up early and explore your neighborhood at 6AM on a bike. Or get an exercycle. Fancy ones make you turn a generator, and by measuring your output, can tell you how many calories you've burned.
Dr Cooper raised the ire of the weightlifting community because by his measure, weight work alone did not increase fitness, and sometimes reduced it. Since Cooper, Aerobic or cardiovascular exercise is now considered an essential part of any exercise routine.
Re:But what comes next?
on
NASA Turns 50
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Add to this the fact that NASA's current mission, Moon+Mars is unfunded, and NASA has to cut left and right just to study the mission. Bush essentially gave NASA a huge unfunded mandate. Mars will never get a manned visit in the current budget climate, so the study just steals money from the other missions.
And then there's the inconvenient truth that almost all the good science is being done by unmanned craft. Try and list scientific accomplishments that have come out of the International Space Station. With the dubious exception of crystal growth, most of them have to do with acclimatizing humans to space, or bringing some simple plant or insect to LEO to see what happens. Basically no interesting science has happened except with the robot explorations.
Finally, there's the canceling in 2006 of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) due to "competing priorities." This to me is the final proof that Moon+Mars is killing space science.
My conclusion: Either we should actually separately fund Moon+Mars or we should kill it and re-allocate the money to unmanned projects (like the Mars Rovers & DSCOVR) that are doing actual science.
DVDs are a reasonable choice. Make 2 copies of each disk, and save the 2nd copy at a safe offsite location (I use my parents' house). Mother nature does security by repetition, so the strategy is billions of years old. DVDs will be supported for decades to come, but in 10 years when holographic disks are a dime a dozen, switch to them. In 20 years, some of the mechanical parts of an idle HDD may get stuck. In 20 years, flash RAM may leak its charge.
Yes, the graph of melting point vs mixture is called a eutectic diagram. Every new compound in the mix can lower the melting point significantly. This
patent claims to solve the problem. It says:
[0024] To prevent Sn whisker growth, one should remove at least one of the three following conditions of whisker growth: (1) Room temperature grain boundary diffusion of Sn in Sn, (2) Room temperature reaction between Sn and Cu to form Cu.sub.6Sn.sub.5, and (3) Formation of a stable and protective surface of Sn-oxide. If we remove any one or more of them, we should have in principle no whisker growth. In practice, substantially removing any one of them should lead to substantially hindered whisker growth. However, as we found from the synchrotron radiation study, it takes only a very small stress level to grow a Sn whisker. It is thus a difficult problem to prevent Sn whisker growth. The solution recommended by NEMI is to satisfy the condition (2) by preventing the Cu from reacting with Sn. To satisfy the condition (3) is unrealistic since one would have to have no oxide on the surface of the finish and to keep the device in ultra-high vacuum, or at least in an oxygen-free environment, to prevent oxidation. We disclose here to substantially satisfy the condition (1) by blocking the grain boundary diffusion of Sn. Also, we disclose that a combination of the two solutions together to satisfy both conditions (1) and (2) is even better.
[0025] To prevent Sn whisker growth, one should uncouple stress generation and stress relaxation. One should remove both stress generation and stress relaxation. Stress generation can be removed by blocking the diffusion of Cu into Sn. The NEMI solution is to stop the diffusion of Cu into Sn by electroplating a layer of Ni between the Cu and Sn solder finish. The Ni serves as a diffusion barrier to prevent the diffusion of Cu into Sn. However, up to now, no solution to prevent stress relaxation has been available. In other words, there has been no teachings regarding preventing the creep process or the diffusion of Sn atoms to the whiskers. We thus disclose here to use another kind of diffusion barrier to stop the diffusion of Sn. Since we should block the diffusion of Sn atoms from substantially every grain of Sn in the finish, it is a non-trivial problem to solve.
I'm mainly a C hacker, but I don't get why people would prefer Python over Java. Dynamic typing where you can create new identifiers implicitly is pretty scary to me. I'm not even sure what Python offers over the dozens of other languages that preceded it. I've hacked lots of C in my time too. Python does strong type-checking at runtime and provides good runtime error messages, while Java and C/C++ do the same at compile time. Python is embeddable in C/C++, and Jython is embeddable in Java. Python can also call all your C/C++ libraries. Think of it as a clean readable glue & scripting language with great string and list tools. Oh, it also has eval & apply for those who want to build functions on the fly.
As of 11 posts, the linked article is unavailable. This being slashdot, who cares? I personally don't think Java will die of old age, but I can see some places where Python will shrink Java and C/C++'s market share.
Let's look at what problem Java was created to solve: Java was designed to be C++ without memory problems. This is a big deal, because some estimates have it that over half of C and C++ bugs are related to either allocation / deallocation errors or buffer overruns. To solve this, Java got rid of malloc, free, and pointers (it also dispenses with those annoying C/C++ header files). The one unfortunate side effect is that Java cannot easily make nice with C and C++ - there's lots of hair involved.
Note that Java's original market was programmers familiar with C/C++. Note also that Java has not killed off C or C++. There are some applications where you need to take explicit control of allocation. For example, suppose you are processing video in realtime. You want to track objects through color frames. Each uncompressed frame needs nearly a meg of RAM, so you will allocate about 1.8 GB / minute. If a garbage collector fires up uncontrollably it can create delays that will mess up your processing. For this kind of memory intensive, performance intensive realtime job, you probably don't want Java.
Python does make nice with C/C++. Many fine C libraries have been wrapped in Python wrappers and made callable by Python. This makes Python into a kind of glue language (C# can do the same). You can use Python for things like GUI, parsing, lists, and string handling, and call your C++ routines for performance intensive tasks. Or you can do it the other way around, and embed Python in C++. So Python also markets itself to folks familiar with C/C++ and thus eats into Java's market.
Both Java and C++ are strongly typed, and this is essential for big projects. But for small programs written quickly, strong typing may just slow you down. If, for debugging, you want to change a function to return two ints and a string instead of just one int, in C++ or Java you have to write a class. In Python, you can just return a tuple - so easy! In addition to a glue language, you can treat Python as a scripting language - like Perl only more scaleable (and arguably more readable).
Reynolds missed the 1959 Antartica Treaty. I thought he was some sorta law professor guy?? Seems to me the perfect model for a remote place that all nations might want to make claims on...
I hate the kind of review that tries to imply "if I [the reviewer] had made this movie, I could have fixed X,Y, and Z." I mean, if s/he's so smart and all, why isn't s/he making movies? I think Harrison Ford brings lots to any movie he makes. It'll take more than one silly 2nd-hand anonymous review to convince me he phoned this one in. For all we know, some other studio planning to release on the same weekend could be playing dirty tricks!
The experimental design is good, and I'm glad the experiment was done, but the conclusion of the paper is that there's not enough data to answer the question!
There may be an effect, but if so, it's small enough that 281 experimental subjects and six questions are not enough to yield statistically significant results. That result alone (that the effect is small at best) makes the paper worthwhile to me. One small quibble: on a web page, I can often use scrolling and the bottom or top of the page to check alignment on a wide table. Maybe zebra stripes are more useful on paper.
But before I give up entirely on zebra stripes, I'd like to see what happens when [1] the table is made wider; [2] the table is made taller; [3] the zebra stripes are 2 or 3 rows wide instead of 1; [4] the stripes are made darker and/or a different color.
C'mon people who want publications, there are lots of other things to try here.
At some point, after enough decades, I think it's time to say "forgive and forget the grudge." Yes, 100 years ago, the company made mistakes. Bad mistakes. But how many of us had ancestors who were slaveholders? How many had ancestors who were part of repressive regimes? Or who opressed women or despised various minorities?
If we can't forgive and forget the grudges, we are doomed to keep fighting over the same grudges for thousands of years. Bad idea.
I remember when Marilyn Vos Savant presented the Monty Hall Problem in parade magazine, and her presentation was ambiguous about the dependencies. You have to specify that Monty always shows you a goat, regardless of what door you pick; in other words, showing the goat is independent of your original door choice. If you don't specify that, then the problem is ambiguous. For example, what if Monty shows the goat only when your original choice is the car. In that case, changing your choice always gets you the goat.
The movie "21" (I happened to see it last night) also botched the presentation of the Monty Hall Problem in the same way. Nothing was said to indicate whether the game show host's action (showing the goat) was independent of the contestant's choice. It's a subtle point and people presenting the problem often leave the ambiguity.
When you pour tea out of a vessel into another container, your vessel has lost tea, and the new container has gained tea. Not so with data. If I up my data to you, in the end we both have copies. The reality is more like a cup that pours infinitely (much to the RIAA's chagrin). So pouring tea is the wrong metaphor. In any case, as others have pointed out, the hard part of the user interface is selecting what data to transfer. The easy part (and the only part identified in the article) is initiating the transfer and indicating when it's done. Oh, by the way, if a giant transfer takes an hour, do I have to sit there for an hour holding a teacup? Wrong metaphor.
Back during the high tech bubble, you could make a pretty good bet that a job at Microsoft that included stock vesting privileges would make you a millionaire in about 5 years and set for life in 7. This allowed Microsoft to hire and keep some really talented coders and code managers.
And Microsoft was sort of able to do one thing that no other company could really do. Microsoft was (more or less) able to build some really huge software projects in a few years. Such as WinNT/Win2000 and the Office suite. I'm not saying they were perfect, but they were good enough. And nobody else could execute projects on that scale.
My reading of the (years late, mediocre) release of Vista is that Microsoft has lost that one unique ability. My guess is that the kind of coders that used to put in their 7 years at MS are now headed elsewhere, such as Google. And without that steady supply of top tier talent, MS can't innovate quickly. Regarding the loss of one PR flack, PFFFFFT!
It's a little complicated, but there are definite reasons to prefer 1080, especially if you watch movies. For our household, the convincer was "Planet Earth." It's absolutely breathtaking in 1080.
Now some technical details: all modern flat panel displays are progressive scan. 1080i is interlaced, so somewhere, some device needs to resample the interlaced field to make a progressive scan image. Your 1080 TV can do it, some cable boxes can, and there are a variety of de-interlacing chips (google de-interlace 1080), some of which make a mess of it.
HOWEVER: the broadcasters' answer to this problem is to shoot at 24 frames/sec, then upsample to 60 fields interlaced using 3:2 pulldown. Your TV also generally has "cadence detection." Cadence detection detects the 3:2 pulldown and then does easy de-interlacing by combining adjacent fields. The result is perfect de-interlacing, but 24 frames/sec instead of 30 or 60. Since all cinema is shot at 24 frames, this is not generally a problem for movies.
Of the 720p channels, I only watch NatGeo regularly, and it looks really good. But Discovery and HBO can look even better. To repeat myself, Planet Earth was the convincer.
The season average ERA is a useful stat; I don't think the single-season MLB ERA leaders is useful in this case because the pre-1920 years had a wider variance in both pitching and batting quality. And looking at the first table you provide, it says that in 1894 the average ERA was 5.32. I didn't check exhaustively, but I believe it's the highest ERA in the table. Not so coincidentally, 1894 was the year that most simulations found the longest streak. For 1895, the average ERA was 4.78; for 1893 it was 4.66. Other high years: 1929: 4.71, 1930:4.97.
However, a high average ERA is only part of the story; for the simulation to be likely to produce a long streak, you'd need several high batting averages in the same year as the high ERA. I'm too lazy to seek out a list of peak batting averages year by year, but I'd bet there were several high batting averages in each year that NYT figure 2 shows a season with a peak in long streaks. And the key thing about the pre-1920 years of baseball is that they are years of high variance - both year to year in average stats, and, I suspect, within the year between the best quartile and worst quartile of pitchers and batters.
Other posters have complained that the method is wrong because it doesn't know about "dead ball years" and other changes to the way the game is played. Although that's superficially true, there is still plenty of information about "dead ball years" captured in the stats. For example, Babe Ruth, one of the greatest hitters, was often pitched wildly or intentionally walked because pitchers and managers were afraid of him. That fact is reflected, perhaps imperfectly, in the Babe's stats. Similarly, changes in mound height, mound to home distance, outfield size, etc are reflected in ERAs and batting averages.
We switched from Comcast internet to Fios internet about 2 years ago. Fios is hugely better, mainly because of the upload data rate. On Comcast our upload rate was barely enough to acknowledge packets for the max download rate (384Kbits/sec upload IIRC). That means that any kind of two-way traffic will interfere with the acks, and thus reduce your download rate. On Fios our max upload rate is about 2 Mbits/sec. That means I can push 1.2Mbits/sec to an etree.org or shnflac torrent and still pull 8 to 12 Mbits/sec downloads. Sweet! We have stayed with Comcast for video, but if they squash our HD channels we will drop them like a hot potato. Comcast's DVR sucks; I've gotta see if Fios has a better DVR.
Slashdot Mirror
* Moon-Mars is basically unfunded. NASA has to steal from other missions just to study Moon-Mars
* The moon is a lousy steppingstone to Mars. Think about it: to land on a planet with an atmosphere, you can slow down with a parachute. To overcome your delta-V for a moon landing, you need to carry enough fuel to decelerate and to re-launch! If you just skip the moon entirely, you don't have that horribly expensive deceleration phase followed by that expensive acceleration phase.
Face it, most of the actual science done in space has been done by robots and will continue to be for the forseeable future. Humans in space is not a bad idea, but Bush didn't fund Moon-Mars and it's unlikely to get funded any time in the forseeable future. Personally, I've always thought Moon-Mars was a cynical political ploy to win a slice of the nerd vote. But that's just me.
RAID 0 - isn't that also called "Just a Bunch of Disks"? I really think the guy implemented JBOD!
. . . I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
. . . You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.
I learned threads from this book by W. Richard Stevens. I have to warn you that Stevens' books are specific to C, but he has a clear and concise style, and his treatment of the basic issues such as synchronization, locking, shared memory, and semaphores is excellent. If you're coding in C, buy the book; if you're not coding in C you may not need to own it, but you ought to spend a couple hours reading Stevens' discussion of key issues.
See Ivan Sutherland's Wheel of Reincarnation. The idea is that CPUs get faster and graphics move there; then busses get faster and graphics moves to dedicated hardware; rinse and repeat. http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/56341_cycle-of-reincarnation-coined-by-ivan-sutherland-ca.html
And there's a cool thing you can do with that 12-volt battery in the trunk that makes your prius into an emergency generator. Alternate instructions here. Warning, it might void your warranty. My Prius is 4 years old, so my warranty isn't terribly valuable anymore...
Hey, what's wrong with my spell checker? It doesn't know either youtube or slashdotted!?
So that's what is happening to space science in the USA as the Bush term runs out. We are cannibalizing existing programs to study a mission that is unlikely to be funded. Yet another thing Bush has managed to screw up!
And I have not problem with creationism being taught as long as it is taught as science. So every bad fact they have can be pointed out.
I do. Creationism belongs in philosophy class, not science, because creationism makes no testable claims. Creationism says that the world we see is the world science describes, only god not natural processes made it that way. Dinosaur bones in the rock? God hid them there. Structural and genetic similarities in the tree of life? God did it. Why? God works in mysterious ways. No testable claims. Or, more accurately, any testable claims are then altered to match the outcome of the test.
Science class is where we learn how claims are tested. Philosophy class is where we learn to compare systems of thought and see how they differ. The Flying Spaghetti Monster was invented to show now easy it is to make up systems of thought that "explain" the world we see without making testable claims.
Turns out to increase that ratio, you have to get yourself (at least slightly) out of breath, and stay there 20 or more minutes, 4 times / week. To get out of breath, you've got to get your legs involved in a big way. Jogging, biking, and swimming are the most common ways.
If you have a staircase, run up and down for 20 minutes (booring). Or get up early and explore your neighborhood at 6AM on a bike. Or get an exercycle. Fancy ones make you turn a generator, and by measuring your output, can tell you how many calories you've burned.
Dr Cooper raised the ire of the weightlifting community because by his measure, weight work alone did not increase fitness, and sometimes reduced it. Since Cooper, Aerobic or cardiovascular exercise is now considered an essential part of any exercise routine.
And then there's the inconvenient truth that almost all the good science is being done by unmanned craft. Try and list scientific accomplishments that have come out of the International Space Station. With the dubious exception of crystal growth, most of them have to do with acclimatizing humans to space, or bringing some simple plant or insect to LEO to see what happens. Basically no interesting science has happened except with the robot explorations.
Finally, there's the canceling in 2006 of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) due to "competing priorities." This to me is the final proof that Moon+Mars is killing space science. My conclusion: Either we should actually separately fund Moon+Mars or we should kill it and re-allocate the money to unmanned projects (like the Mars Rovers & DSCOVR) that are doing actual science.
DVDs are a reasonable choice. Make 2 copies of each disk, and save the 2nd copy at a safe offsite location (I use my parents' house). Mother nature does security by repetition, so the strategy is billions of years old. DVDs will be supported for decades to come, but in 10 years when holographic disks are a dime a dozen, switch to them. In 20 years, some of the mechanical parts of an idle HDD may get stuck. In 20 years, flash RAM may leak its charge.
Let's look at what problem Java was created to solve: Java was designed to be C++ without memory problems. This is a big deal, because some estimates have it that over half of C and C++ bugs are related to either allocation / deallocation errors or buffer overruns. To solve this, Java got rid of malloc, free, and pointers (it also dispenses with those annoying C/C++ header files). The one unfortunate side effect is that Java cannot easily make nice with C and C++ - there's lots of hair involved.
Note that Java's original market was programmers familiar with C/C++. Note also that Java has not killed off C or C++. There are some applications where you need to take explicit control of allocation. For example, suppose you are processing video in realtime. You want to track objects through color frames. Each uncompressed frame needs nearly a meg of RAM, so you will allocate about 1.8 GB / minute. If a garbage collector fires up uncontrollably it can create delays that will mess up your processing. For this kind of memory intensive, performance intensive realtime job, you probably don't want Java.
Python does make nice with C/C++. Many fine C libraries have been wrapped in Python wrappers and made callable by Python. This makes Python into a kind of glue language (C# can do the same). You can use Python for things like GUI, parsing, lists, and string handling, and call your C++ routines for performance intensive tasks. Or you can do it the other way around, and embed Python in C++. So Python also markets itself to folks familiar with C/C++ and thus eats into Java's market.
Both Java and C++ are strongly typed, and this is essential for big projects. But for small programs written quickly, strong typing may just slow you down. If, for debugging, you want to change a function to return two ints and a string instead of just one int, in C++ or Java you have to write a class. In Python, you can just return a tuple - so easy! In addition to a glue language, you can treat Python as a scripting language - like Perl only more scaleable (and arguably more readable).
Reynolds missed the 1959 Antartica Treaty. I thought he was some sorta law professor guy?? Seems to me the perfect model for a remote place that all nations might want to make claims on...
I hate the kind of review that tries to imply "if I [the reviewer] had made this movie, I could have fixed X,Y, and Z." I mean, if s/he's so smart and all, why isn't s/he making movies? I think Harrison Ford brings lots to any movie he makes. It'll take more than one silly 2nd-hand anonymous review to convince me he phoned this one in. For all we know, some other studio planning to release on the same weekend could be playing dirty tricks!
There may be an effect, but if so, it's small enough that 281 experimental subjects and six questions are not enough to yield statistically significant results. That result alone (that the effect is small at best) makes the paper worthwhile to me. One small quibble: on a web page, I can often use scrolling and the bottom or top of the page to check alignment on a wide table. Maybe zebra stripes are more useful on paper.
But before I give up entirely on zebra stripes, I'd like to see what happens when [1] the table is made wider; [2] the table is made taller; [3] the zebra stripes are 2 or 3 rows wide instead of 1; [4] the stripes are made darker and/or a different color.
C'mon people who want publications, there are lots of other things to try here.
If we can't forgive and forget the grudges, we are doomed to keep fighting over the same grudges for thousands of years. Bad idea.
The movie "21" (I happened to see it last night) also botched the presentation of the Monty Hall Problem in the same way. Nothing was said to indicate whether the game show host's action (showing the goat) was independent of the contestant's choice. It's a subtle point and people presenting the problem often leave the ambiguity.
When you pour tea out of a vessel into another container, your vessel has lost tea, and the new container has gained tea. Not so with data. If I up my data to you, in the end we both have copies. The reality is more like a cup that pours infinitely (much to the RIAA's chagrin). So pouring tea is the wrong metaphor. In any case, as others have pointed out, the hard part of the user interface is selecting what data to transfer. The easy part (and the only part identified in the article) is initiating the transfer and indicating when it's done. Oh, by the way, if a giant transfer takes an hour, do I have to sit there for an hour holding a teacup? Wrong metaphor.
And Microsoft was sort of able to do one thing that no other company could really do. Microsoft was (more or less) able to build some really huge software projects in a few years. Such as WinNT/Win2000 and the Office suite. I'm not saying they were perfect, but they were good enough. And nobody else could execute projects on that scale.
My reading of the (years late, mediocre) release of Vista is that Microsoft has lost that one unique ability. My guess is that the kind of coders that used to put in their 7 years at MS are now headed elsewhere, such as Google. And without that steady supply of top tier talent, MS can't innovate quickly. Regarding the loss of one PR flack, PFFFFFT!
Now some technical details: all modern flat panel displays are progressive scan. 1080i is interlaced, so somewhere, some device needs to resample the interlaced field to make a progressive scan image. Your 1080 TV can do it, some cable boxes can, and there are a variety of de-interlacing chips (google de-interlace 1080), some of which make a mess of it.
HOWEVER: the broadcasters' answer to this problem is to shoot at 24 frames/sec, then upsample to 60 fields interlaced using 3:2 pulldown. Your TV also generally has "cadence detection." Cadence detection detects the 3:2 pulldown and then does easy de-interlacing by combining adjacent fields. The result is perfect de-interlacing, but 24 frames/sec instead of 30 or 60. Since all cinema is shot at 24 frames, this is not generally a problem for movies.
According to a six month old CNET page, the HD versions of these channels are 720p:
while the HD versions of these channels are 1080i:Of the 720p channels, I only watch NatGeo regularly, and it looks really good. But Discovery and HBO can look even better. To repeat myself, Planet Earth was the convincer.
However, a high average ERA is only part of the story; for the simulation to be likely to produce a long streak, you'd need several high batting averages in the same year as the high ERA. I'm too lazy to seek out a list of peak batting averages year by year, but I'd bet there were several high batting averages in each year that NYT figure 2 shows a season with a peak in long streaks. And the key thing about the pre-1920 years of baseball is that they are years of high variance - both year to year in average stats, and, I suspect, within the year between the best quartile and worst quartile of pitchers and batters.
Other posters have complained that the method is wrong because it doesn't know about "dead ball years" and other changes to the way the game is played. Although that's superficially true, there is still plenty of information about "dead ball years" captured in the stats. For example, Babe Ruth, one of the greatest hitters, was often pitched wildly or intentionally walked because pitchers and managers were afraid of him. That fact is reflected, perhaps imperfectly, in the Babe's stats. Similarly, changes in mound height, mound to home distance, outfield size, etc are reflected in ERAs and batting averages.
We switched from Comcast internet to Fios internet about 2 years ago. Fios is hugely better, mainly because of the upload data rate. On Comcast our upload rate was barely enough to acknowledge packets for the max download rate (384Kbits/sec upload IIRC). That means that any kind of two-way traffic will interfere with the acks, and thus reduce your download rate. On Fios our max upload rate is about 2 Mbits/sec. That means I can push 1.2Mbits/sec to an etree.org or shnflac torrent and still pull 8 to 12 Mbits/sec downloads. Sweet! We have stayed with Comcast for video, but if they squash our HD channels we will drop them like a hot potato. Comcast's DVR sucks; I've gotta see if Fios has a better DVR.